Economics of Education

Summary

Find out how England's education budget is divided between competing priorities and distributed to individual schools, in this video for headteachers on finance, performance and management.

Economist and broadcaster Liam Halligan bakes a giant cake to represent the £72bn 2005/06 education budget, and slices the cake to demonstrate how the money is shared out. Halligan is eventually reduced to putting crumbs on plates to indicate the few thousand pounds left over for school departments.

The video asks whether good education is dependent on a big budget, and explores how one inner-city secondary school managed to double its GCSE pass rate without any extra government cash.